Ethical search engine optimisation my foot!
The beginnings
Some month ago a colleague of mine considered it a good plan to start an own company in a market that is very competitive and has a lot of shady characters.
The project was planned as low-budget as possible: Hand coded HTML, no database functionality, no CMS and just a few pages to do. Nothing fancy.
He hired a designer to come up with a corporate identity and he did a logo and went through some Corbis CDs to find pictures of shiny happy successful people and mood-selling baby pictures.
It was my task then to deliver the web site. Of course the money for the designer ran out when it came to developing a style guide for type and screen design, which is why I made up the CSS on the spot while converting the five word documents the original site was planned for.
The site was a flexible, easy to resize and accessible xhtml + CSS solution and my pride and joy, as I wanted to make it an example of how we can deliver and create nice sites quickly. I even promoted it on here and in some forums to help it get the first hits and maybe a fresh perspective from other people (being the developer you are always too close to the project).
Now, some minor changes later the colleague wanted to get a more prominent contact facility, which was easily implemented. Then the millions of clients didn’t come.
Enter the SEO consultant
Out of the blue, an SEO consultant was asked to help the site getting more visitors and allegedly this consultant was very good in ethical SEO and understands what web visitors need and want.
The first step was that we got a presentation on how table layouts have to be amended to be good for SEO, which made me ask if they ever looked at the site as it stands now (it has content first – navigation second – as an accessibility measure, which allegedly is good for SEO and tables only for data display).
After this question made my colleague aware that the first hour of presentation was a big waste of time and money, the consultant got tasked with a competitive analysis and coming up with a list of keywords we should be using.
Meanwhile, lazy developer that I am, I made sure that my colleague and the consultant can edit the title, the meta tags (which according to them was still very valid indeed) and some HTML comments (which I don’t see as a practical measure at all but who am I to judge) via a CSV file on the server. A PHP script reads the CVS file that they can maintain in Excel, and – according to filename – add the appropriate titles and stuff. I thought I was clever and get only work that is really necessary.
Step one – keywords all around
The SEO consultant came back with a list of keywords and some HTML templates which were totally different from the site as it is – copied and pasted in a Word document.
Some of the changes were:
- Summaries of data tables should feature a lot of keywords – nobody sees them anyways but they are great for search engines
- Every link needed a title attribute with keywords
- The alternative text of the logo can be used for keywords and can change from page to page
I drew the line at the table summaries, but the rest got done.
Step two – link as link can
The next step was that the SEO consultant should come up with “landing pages” for different special topics. These pages have the motherlode of keyword repetition and were designed to be linked to by third party pages.
A “useful links” section was planned, which basically should list some of the link partners in between keyword-laden links which point back to this page – as link sharing is good, but god forbid users would leave the page
Furthermore, a “Quick Navigation” was introduced in the footer of the page – remember, the page still was more or less 10 pages in total – which had links with lots of keywords pointing to the same pages the site navigation pointed to.
For that I was able to sell them the idea of my “taming the select”:http://icant.co.uk/forreview/tamingselect/ script to at least not show these links all the time but as a dropdown.
Step 3 – On with the chaos
As the landing pages got linked to by other sites, it now seemed to be a good idea to include them into the main site, and start a new section in the main navigation for them – of course interlinking. The original design had a horizontal navigation and it was fun trying to fit a link that should say “foo bar” but needs to be “foo and bazbarfoo and foo and bar UK” in there.
Another way of adding more links was spotted – a “see also” section, which should be after the main heading and link to different pages in the same site with different keywords – some of them linking to the same page with different keywords.
The last thing we haven’t explored yet was file names. So I was asked to rename all the documents in the site from “foo.php” to “foo_bar_baz_barbaz_foo_and_bar_2005_UK” as that would be “good practise”, too.
Now, as a visitor I get:
* Ever changing navigation – effectively breaking my bookmarks (although I tried to redirect most on the server)
* Links promising me more information but at times linking to the parent page of the one I am on
* A 40 links to 4 paragraphs content to navigation ratio on most pages
* A “useful links” section pointing to the site I am on
And this was one of the nice playing SEO consultants. I cannot wait for the next tricks I am asked to implement.
If you are likely to get an SEO overhaul of a site you have done, prepare for the following:
- Make the site independent of file names
- Make sure your design can fit a lot of links
- Be sure to keep everything in the template flexible – and don’t think for a moment that you can separate content and markup – you will be asked to add a lot of title attributes.
January 5th, 2007 at 4:02 am
September 26th, 2005 at 4:45 pm
Sad indeed. That’s all there is to say, really.
September 27th, 2005 at 3:06 am
Bummer man, especially when the SEO is wrong. Giving your file names underscores is not as desirable as hyphens. Google sees blue_cheese as one word and you will get fewer hits from that than if you made the file names blue-cheese which to Google is two words that you can match on.
October 30th, 2005 at 4:46 pm
Chasing Google’s tail is a very difficult thing… especially as – in my experience – they can’t even tell you how their algorythm works.
We spend a lot of money with Google and some months we simply drop off the search pages all together. And I mean all together.
Despite all Google’s huff and puff about the correct way to markup your pages etc, the sad fact is that gateway pages, footers full of links and ‘useful links’ pages still have a positive effect on SEO.
And as long as that still has an effect on the bottom line – ‘consultants’ like you experienced will still get a gig.
October 30th, 2005 at 4:50 pm
Mark:
Until Google changes that policy.
The best way to optimize your site is to not try to game the system.
October 30th, 2005 at 5:09 pm
I’ve experienced the same myself, and it’s kinda irritating. Often the reason for such SEO is the fact that the client doesn’t want to spend the money it takes to do the job. Instead they take a major short cut with alot of dirtytricks.
I never liked the landing page tactics, since your offering the users alot of nonscence content in hope of getting the attraction. What people often forget is that this is the content that the user in some situations accually will see, which doesn’t make you look very credible. People today have alot of experience with spam in emails, and I am pretty sure such pages when seen gets the spam lable, rendering the client as a fool. No sale to put it in other words.
It’s always sad when the page essentially gets destroyed when being optimized.
If I were you I’d probably push for some display: none; at all those annoying “seo”-links, since no engines at the moment penalizes this. But in the end it’s the client who desides what kind of webpage he wants, and you are probably better of not interfering to much as it will turn out being your fault in the end if the SEO doesn’t work as planned… Theese SEO people are often quick to put the blame on other people, I’ve seen that to many times.
October 30th, 2005 at 5:14 pm
Oh… my.. god…!
October 30th, 2005 at 5:19 pm
I’d be interested to hear what kind of rankings and traffic he was receiving before and after these seo tricks.
October 30th, 2005 at 5:34 pm
Fascinating.
I am just starting work with a ‘nice’ SEO consultancy on a very big site that you have heard of. So far all seems good, but it is very early days, and I can’t wait to see how it all pans out.
I’m told that these guys are the best – but of course, if the best way to get good rankings is to disrupt the user experience in ways you describe, then is that what they are going to suggest? And more to the point, am I going to be able to stick my oar in and disagree after they’ve just spent thousands of £s on the research?
October 30th, 2005 at 6:42 pm
Hmm. Just as I always have imagined it.
SEO consultant with a solution looking for an answer and a sales spiel that quickly notifies you they are reading from a canned script and never even looked at your site, much less did a view source.
Once hired, site is converted into one of those traffic absorbing nonentities I quickly leave because it showed well in the search results, but has no usable content and I DO NOT TRUST who it links to.
SEO’s are all about traffic, rarely about promotion and presentation. Their goals are diametrically opposite to what the user wants which is to go to a site that either 1) actually sells the product or service they are looking for, or 2) actually has the information they are researching.
As a site admin, I’m getting really sick and tired of the 6-month cycle of being called by some dumber-than-rocks boiler room rep with all the noise in the background who, once he realizes I know more than the average mark quickly turns me over to high pressure manager Sergey or Bob who then tries to tell me how my website is going to the proverbial place in a handbasket because I am not using his service. If he finally gives me a company contact website, it is a PO Box in Reno or Las Vegas. Also basically, if there is any sort of TOS on the website, it merely says that they have the right to remove money from my bank account with no recourse and no guarantee that the expected work will even be done.
And the above paragraph only addresses the non-ethical ones.
October 30th, 2005 at 11:31 pm
Ughhh. My company offers SEO only so our clients don’t hire someone else to do it.
We have to fight to convince them that it is in their best long-term interest to just use semantic markup and best practices as described by Google and Yahoo (and nothing else).
October 31st, 2005 at 12:27 am
It might be easy for me to say, as a freelancer, but we have to take our own stand. I understand, that some of you have to make a living, and we do want that client to pay us. However, it should not come at the price of our nerves, frustration and disappointment in life and humanity.
Your client might be good at selling tea kettles. Might be better than you. But we can say, with an ample deegre of certainty, that we better than him in creating websites or whatever â otherwise he wouldnât come to seek our services.
So we should position ourselves with dignity, as artisans that we are, rather than slaves-coders, turning at every whim of that master-client. He does us a favour by paying us, but we do him a favor by providing him with fine product. It is not the servitude, but mutually beneficial partnership. At least it should be.
At last, let me recite article from Lebedevâs com/mandership (The Customer is Always Wrong, namely paragraphs 24, 25 and 27
October 31st, 2005 at 3:05 am
The problem with SEOs is that the people-with-a-cheque-book-but-no-clue within the company swallow the sales pitch with zero critical judgement. Example: I used to be the sysadmin and de facto web site designer/editor/manager in a local council. It has two sites, one main site and one for a tourist attraction. The head of finance (my boss) was contacted by an SEA one day and told that both sites really needed optimising and it would only cost a small fortune to do so. Boss emails me and says “why aren’t our sites at the top of the rankings?”. I reply to boss including the search results for the names in ten search engines. They were both the top result in all ten already. Some people just don’t have a clue but somehow get promoted to positions with cheque books…go figure.
October 31st, 2005 at 3:03 pm
Good seo = keyword in title, keywords in description, keywords in h1 h2 h3 (where appropriate and so it makes sense!) keywords in alt *(Edit attributes – there is no such thing as an alt tag, just don’t mention it any longer, please!!!!) * of liked images (again that make sense) keywords in navigation (lots of tricks here, but again that make sense – nothing too spammy) and yes keywords in file names… then get loads of links from RELEVANT websites
October 31st, 2005 at 4:42 pm
Chris, Thanks for the expository description of your experience with SEOs. What a shame. Fortunately, I’ve never had to worry too much about this type of thing. Occasionally I will get an up-ity client who calls every day the first month after their site is launched wondering why their site isn’t showing up on google for some obscure keyword, but those have been few. I have been successful with most clients selling the idea that hard work and patience pays off…and you can’t expect immediate results from something you just hatched.
October 31st, 2005 at 9:28 pm
you know I was about to come here and say something to the effect of ” i have had it with the all the burn the seo people ” but on reading this… I totally agree that this is the ‘stupidest’ crap I have ever heard of. what about direct marketing. I cant believe people actually rely on a search engine to sell there product anyway, I mean search engines work but most people already know what they want and already know what site to go to. it would be better spent money to buy some print or tv ot radion. somebody needs to write an article on “know your target audience, and how to reach them” and leave the SEO consultants to go out of business, well at least diversify, dont want to see anyone loose means of earing.
November 1st, 2005 at 4:18 pm
Uhh… I have to disagree with David’s last comment… tv/print/radio is not a smart alternative to search marketing. It depends largely on the product/service you’re marketing, but search engine marketing takes the guesswork out of finding your niche market, and does so at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising. Moreover, the impressions are free! $10,000 spent on Overture/Adwords will get you much further than $10,000 spent for a 1/4 page ad buried in some magazine… and $10k won’t get you 30 seconds on t.v.
SEO, when done properly, can yield excellent results for clients… shored up by a PPC marketing account and a WELL DESIGNED website (search engines can drive the traffic, but it’s up to the website to convert!).
November 1st, 2005 at 8:44 pm
Commenting on Chrisâ experience with a bad SEO company, this is a dirty shame and a problem that continues to plague the SEO industry. (Disclosure Alert: I do work in SEO) WSJ ran a story 1-2 months back on a similar story regarding a very shady SEO company that wrecked a lot of peopleâs SEO rankings.
This will be a chronic issue for SEO, since SEO work is very different from other consultancy jobs. Things change quickly and there is a lack of hard âindustry dataâ that exist at the same level, like studies compiled by eMarketer etc.
We cannot say for a fact what search engines algorithms are ranking for, but we can derive very educated guesses from experience and experimentation. Unfortunately, there enough SEO consultants who make very uneducated guesses or intentionally enter the âblack hatâ realm of SEO.
But, I think as SEO and search engines continue to mature – it will be more about a cross between helping users find the web site through search engines and making sure the site is relevant, drives traffic, user friendly, and most importantly conversion.
Chrisâ experience is very similar to the early days of SEO: âjust put words like âsexâ, âteensâ etc â and youâll rank number #1 and get great traffic!â. Relevancy of the traffic, User friendliness and likeliness to convert counts more than âdriving trafficâ or always being #1 for a limited set of keywords.
So how do you find out if something fishy is going on with your SEO company?
The short answer is simply â if doesnât look right, it probably isnât. Long answer is an SEO consultant should fully disclose the strategy and methodologies of their work and take a holistic long term approach: Why do they insist on placing links on a certain copy on a certain page? How will it affect rankings v. the user experience? Will making change A or B influence if the user comes back to the site to convert?
Properly done and for the appropriate client, an SEO campaign can be highly effective way to drive relevent traffic and reveunue.
On a last note: I can see some of the logic behind the recommendations, specifically âStep Oneâ â but the level of aggressiveness described is simply keyword spamming and Spam SEO. Beyond black hat SEO, it seems just plain ineffective and counterproductive.
And thatâs my two-cents.
November 2nd, 2005 at 12:06 pm
> edit…some HTML comments
Dude, that is nuts! Tell the client you put thisisacompletandutterwasteoftime, which Google reports no results for, into a comment, and see how many SEs out of Yahoo, Google, MSN and Ask show the page. If it can’t help a page rank for a non-existent non-term, what chance does it have of helping anything else?
Sounds to me like the SEO is trying to party like its 1999. Wow, what a great name fora song…
November 2nd, 2005 at 12:42 pm
The whole term white hat/black hat seo is a joke to start with, who determines ethics within SEO? The search engines? Competiting SEO firms?
The true fact is, a usable, well designed website, with content relevant to its actual target market will rank in the search engines. However, website owners cannot expect overnight miracles, it is a long process that takes constant monitoring of their market and visitors.
Website owners need to be educated to understand how they find their target market and how there website can appeal to that market. There is a place for SEO and well designed websites but they are compatible, a SEO should inform the website owner what users are searching for in relation to their target market, this should have an impact on the content of the website as the website needs to be relevant! However, if the website is badly designed (either hacked by an SEO or a bad web designer) the user will soon leave!
Content is king!
A website owner needs to have patience as long as they have the basics in place with a relavant website, they will see an improvement. Obviously organic search engine rankings can be complemented with PPC traffic! There should no longer be an us and them attitude, surely there is scope to work together!
An SEO can determine the market a web designer can make sure they convert a visit into a sale! Thats how it should be….
(and yes I am an SEO)
November 2nd, 2005 at 5:01 pm
Avoid anyone using the term “ethical”. Or “honest”
Would you buy a used car from “Honest John, The Honest Used Car Salesman”?
In my experience, there are very, very few SEOs worth the expense. The fact is: no-one knows exactly how the search engines are ranking sites, except those who work at the search engines. Also, there are sites dominating very competitive keyword areas that have NEVER had an seo near them. That alone should tell you something.
Hire people who understand the marketing and business objectives.
In order to seperate the wheat from the chaff, ask them how they intend to meet business objectives? How will they return value? Hint: rankings do not, in themselves, add value.
November 2nd, 2005 at 7:52 pm
“SEO” is just a selling point for an accessibility engineer. At least that’s all I use it for. Face it – The marketing department is more interested in traffic from Google than coding for the blind. When infact, coding to standards, you are accomplishing both. Just don’t tell them that :-)
.02 cents
November 2nd, 2005 at 10:23 pm
The trouble with this story is that it is just plain ridiculous and I simply dont believe a word of it. Combining good search engine practices with effective useability, appropriate design and writing is easy and obvious. For every amateur SEO expert, there is an amateur designer.
I dont agree that SEO is different from other marketing jobs – the market is google and that is where SEO works for clients. Like all markets it changes and behaves unpredictably
November 3rd, 2005 at 3:22 am
sholto,
I didn’t make any of that up, please do not patronise me. Thanks. If all things about SEO are easy and obvious and no issue, why are so many people here commenting on it? Are all of them “amateur designers”?
November 17th, 2005 at 2:37 pm
Hey,
I’ve read your article. I have to say, I’m a but surprised at your conclusion. All the things he suggested aren’t dodgey, they’re just about creating pages with focused content, as well as improving markup(though it sounds like not much needed to be done on that)
You say the navigation changes, and visitors are confused, well boy, I see that as a failing on your part. You were told requirements for SEO, and it’s up to you to design around tose requirements, creating an elegant solution.
Perhaps the SEO people were brought in too late in the day, or you should’ve charged more to redesign the site around their suggestions, but either eay there’s nothing about what you suggested, that doesn’t mean you couldn’t come up with a decent solution.
It even sounds like you created your own issues, suggesting the ‘landing pages’ be added to the navigation.
Also, to the people equating good markup/accessibility with SEO, I have to say they’re wrong. It’s partof it sure, but it’s not that simplistic. SEO is part of an overall strategy of Online Marketing. Knowing when to optomize your site, or when to use something google adwords is really key, that a professional will be able to tell you.
November 17th, 2005 at 2:47 pm
Kevin,
the point is that I am not maintaining the site any longer. It is true that the SEO people were brought in far too late, and I could have come up with a more decent solution.
Fact however is that changing table summaries and creating 40 links on each page that only link internally does not mean “ethical” or “user centric” SEO to me.
The navigation changes constantly as the SEO strategy seems to change daily, too. That is nothing that can be called a failure on my part. It just does not make sense to call a menu entry “foo_keyword_baz_keyword_uk” when all it links to is foo.
December 20th, 2005 at 11:27 pm
It’s unfortunate that you got such poor advice. That’s what happens when you do SEO on the cheap. It’s the same as hiring dirt cheap designers or programmers – except in those cases you can usually tell something is wrong/broken before you go out and ruin your brand.
Beware of snake oil salesmen promising you big results for little effort. Good SEO (good as in “effective”) isn’t magic – it takes a lot of hard work and has to be an ongoing effort.
There is such a thing as SEO that actually improves a site, not just its rankings. Believe me, as an in-house SEO for an e-commerce company it’s in my best interest to make sure our SEO efforts don’t hurt usability or conversion.
January 3rd, 2006 at 10:02 am
Have to agree with what Melanie said – “Good SEO (good as in âeffectiveâ) isnât magic â it takes a lot of hard work and has to be an ongoing effort.”
It seems a bit unfair to tarnish the whole SEO industry as a whole with the actions of one individual. What you have been advised/asked to do, may work in certain scenarios, however it is about implementing the SEO campaign as a whole that will determine the success or failure of the campaign.
At the end of the day, A lot of SEO isnt brain science. It just takes a lot of work, and lot of time, and most importantly a lot of patience.
January 13th, 2006 at 5:41 pm
Ever notice every “seo” Has a different opinion? People it is pure crap, why would anyone need an seo? By the way where did they get their seo degree? A guy reads some forums and all of sudden he is an seo. Pure garbage I can not believe people pay for such nonsense. In 20 years vh1 will do on segment on i love the 2000′s and joke about the existense of something called an SEO. “They had black hat seo’s and white hat seo’s”-insert visual joke here.
Edit: I think it is a joke that you used a link exchange page as your URL to go with this comment…
May 8th, 2006 at 9:29 am
I have read stories like this and had people tell me that a SEO Guy has guarateed them #1-10 on google. I immediately tell them that any changes to be made upon the request of an SEO will must be made by them (even if they have to ‘learn the site’ and that once changes have been made any service agreement between us is null and void.
I usually then add that this is my official position, but I am happy to look over any proposed changes, and If agreeable to me I will authorise and implement them with no foul to the service agreement..
This way I have found the clients to me much interested in my standpoint – and some have even gone on be to very like ex-smokers… banging on about Accessability and SEO snakes to their corporate buddies!
August 9th, 2006 at 10:29 pm
When we started doing SEO 3 years ago, our giclee printing company was making literally no money, with an annual gross of $4,400. A SEO consultant who now works for us optimized the site. A year later with many top rankings in Google and the annual gross is in the 6 figures. Please, you are doing a disservice by shooting down SEO consultants. Some of them, like ours, have made the difference between me having a nice home instead of filing for bankruptcy. I am not exaggerating, it is the honest truth and I have the books and history to prove it. As a matter of fact, we opened an ethical SEO company with the consultant in charge because we want to help others. I was there shopping for SEO and until we found the right people, it was a challenge. Some of them were grossly overpriced and others did not know what they were doing. Like in every field, there are bad and good apples…
August 14th, 2007 at 11:30 am
Maybe it’s not the SEO that’s the problem to start off with but the SE at the root. Google & Yahoo are useful, no doubt, but they’re just taking advantage of a thinking gap that the w3c left at the begining : “How to find relevant information”. They later tried to fix it by promoting the semantic web but the damage (bad practise) was done. Still, would be nice to see us all develop towards it someday. A semantic web where nodes are rated by users and search results which rank by USER RATING and not misinformation that content creators use to improve their traffic, money paid to search engine companies floating on the stock market, or money paid to clever consultant which think they found a business angle to con customers.
November 27th, 2007 at 6:37 am
[...] See also: “Ethical Search Engine Optimization My Foot!” [...]
April 24th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
I don’t think their are many SEO consultants in the UK..yet. No doubt their day will come. I hate people who purport to be ‘ethical SEO’ guys and they keyword spam the hell out of pages. the whole reason why people invest in SEO is that it should deliver high levels of return over time. By jamming pages with keywords, in content and in navigation, you’ll never get anyone to buy making the whole process worthless.
July 7th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Really cool stuff la, can I copy your article for my blog?